The Intelligence You Need is the Kind You’d Fire

The trouble with intelligence, especially in the corporate imagination, is that it’s been cleaned up to the point of sterility. We assume smart teams must be tidy, rational, and interchangeable. As if intelligence were a kind of disinfectant, rather than a gloriously fermenting mess. This is why Mandevillian intelligence is such an impious concept. It suggests that a group becomes smarter not by cleansing itself of bias, error, or eccentricity, but by leaning into them. You don’t get a sharp collective mind by filling it with individually well-behaved ones. You get it by allowing a few lunatics to piss in the fountain.

Marketing, of all disciplines, should understand this best. Ours is not the world of fixed inputs and guaranteed returns. We do not run a chip factory. We operate in a domain where value is conjured out of context, perception, and social contagion. Which is precisely why you want people on your team who stew, digress, and generally refuse to process information like obedient CPUs. In a creative environment, the person who refuses to “move on” may be a F*in’ nuisance, but they’re also a hedge against mediocrity.

This, in essence, is the mischief of Mandevillian intelligence: the idea that collective success emerges not by fixing individual flaws, but by letting them grate against each other in just the right way. Flawless thinkers, neatly aligned, rarely produce anything unexpected. What they produce, reliably, is the most convincing version of last year’s error. The useful kind of intelligence in marketing is rarely elegant. It’s messy, glitchy, awkward at parties. It thrives on the friction between one person’s blind spot and another’s obsession. The value lies not in celebrating bias, but in keeping enough unpredictability in the system for bias to be challenged, subverted or caught in the act. That’s where original ideas tend to hide,in the bits no one meant to design.

It’s no accident that capitalism’s most interesting ideas come from awkward people. What Mandevillian intelligence reminds us is that brilliance often arrives by mistake, and that mistakes are more likely when you allow cognitive deviance to flourish.

So why does this matter? Because marketing is not an exercise in applied rationality. It is, if done properly, an exercise in controlled heresy. The marketer’s job is not to remove irrationality, but to navigate it, amplify it, and on occasion, manufacture it wholesale. To do that well, you need a team that resembles a late-night bar argument. People who chase tangents, hold grudges, ignore feedback, and insist on being difficult about things that "don’t really matter." Because, more often than not, they do.

You don’t build collective intelligence by assembling a panel of balanced, agreeable, evidence-respecting professionals. You build it by protecting the stubborn, the eccentric, and the downright annoying from the well-intentioned but idiotic impulse to standardise how people think.

And if you’re in a leadership role and tempted to remove these people for the sake of harmony, ask yourself this. When was the last time you were surprised by a consensus?